Around the world Quote by Jared Diamond

“Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern…

— Jared Diamond

“All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.”

— Jared Diamond

“As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“It didn’t disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn’t invent it in order to copy spoken language, but…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The Sumerian language was originally that of the hunter and fisher peoples, who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region, and…

— Margarethe Uepermann

“Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic…

— Jared Diamond

To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what the Old…

— Joseph Needham

“Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“M. Halévy started a theory to the effect that Sumerian was not a language at all, in the proper sense of the term, but…

— Leonard William King

“The kings of the First Babylonian Dynasty wrote their votive inscriptions sometimes in Sumerian, sometimes in Semitic Babylonian; at other times they employed both…

— Leonard William King

“Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.”

— Jared Diamond